Sheriff's office vs. Coast Guard in Prohibition era Ocean County

Travel back in time with Erik Larsen of the Asbury Park Press for a visit to Ocean County in the 1930s, when political boss Thomas A. Mathis ruled not from an iron throne, but with an iron first.
Erik Larsen

In the 1920s, the Coast Guard defended U.S. coastal waters from rumrunners and bootleggers. This undated photo was taken during the Prohibition era at the Coast Guard station in Cape May County, showing off some of the agency's fleet there.(Photo: Courtesy of the New Jersey Maritime Museum)

During the Prohibition era, the Coast Guard was tasked with keeping illegal alcohol from reaching bootleggers on the Jersey Shore.

But in Ocean County in 1926, some of the heroic Coast Guardsmen who were keeping the spirits at bay by night were clandestinely operating as rumrunners by day.

That is until then-Ocean County Sheriff John A.G. Grant got wind that something was amiss.

Grant himself was not a fan of the 18th Amendment that prohibited the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” between 1920 and 1933, which had led to the rise of organized crime in the United States, public corruption and a decline of Victorian era morality.

“Although against the 18th Amendment personally, I conscientiously believe that as long as we have such a law, the same should be enforced whether it meets with my personal views or not,” Grant wrote in a letter to the Asbury Park Press on June 14, 1926.

By that year, Prohibition had become extremely unpopular and extensively ignored.

By the end of the 1920s in New York City, Police Commissioner Grover Aloysius Whalen, estimated to a crowd at the Rotary Club in Manhattan that there were 32,000 speakeasies within his jurisdiction, as told in a 2007 New York Times article.

In Chicago, the famed mobster Al Capone was averaging an annual income of $60 million from trafficking in illegal booze alone. When adjusted for inflation, that amount is equal to $846,782,521 in buying power in 2018.

A connection between rumrunning at the Shore and the Coast Guard was first uncovered in the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office when the county game warden – who was also a deputy sheriff – began investigating illegal geese hunting on Barnegat Bay in 1925.

Every time his routine patrols took him passed a particular hunting club in the southern part of the county, he noticed that a flag would rise to the top of a mast across the marsh. Every time.

“Suspecting that he was being watched, (Game Warden J. Hamilton) Everham got Mrs. Mary Arnold to visit the club and order a duck banquet served for a number of friends,” the Asbury Park Press reported in a front page article on July 23, 1926. “This ruse was successful and Everham had club members arrested.”

But then something peculiar happened at the hearing for the club members. A Coast Guardsman “dashed in with a bottle of liquor he said he found in Everham’s car.”

A bemused judge said he would have to confer with Sheriff Grant about the matter, which led to the discovery that the staged outburst in the courtroom had been an attempted setup to discredit Everham, and in doing so, clear the club members of any wrongdoing.

Grant soon discovered that one of the men charged at the club was the son of Capt. Thomas Beers, who commanded the Coast Guard station in Long Beach Township.

From there, interrogations of various rumrunners and informants revealed various acts of the official corruption — such as one in December 1925, a Coast Guard captain and members of his crew brought eight cases of Scotch whiskey to a pier in Tuckerton aboard a Coast Guard vessel.

The liquor was unloaded and taken to an area restaurant where it was brought through the back door. Affidavits were collected and the investigation proceeded further in an effort to obtain the identities of the Coast Guard officials.

At this point, the Sheriff’s Office contacted the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C., and Superintendent M.W. Rasmussen of the Coast Guard’s Fifth District and his staff were dispatched to Ocean County to join the investigation.

Capt. Beers denied the allegations but a machinist’s mate broke down under interrogation and implicated everyone suspected in the scheme. He explained that under the supervision of the captain, the crews were transporting booze to various locations along Ocean County for $2 a case ($28 in 2018 money) – which usually had to be split among a four-member crew. But that amount could add up rather quickly, depending on the number of cases that had to be moved and the number of times their services were required.

Moreover, some Coast Guardsmen had been promised as much as $200 (almost $3,000 in 2018 money) just for protecting shipments of liquor while in transit.

Other confessions followed until one of the captains admitted his complicity in the racket.

The Coast Guard would later determine that at least four stations along the Jersey Shore were involved — with one of the wives of the captains acting as a go-between with the rumrunners.

“As a result of the disclosures made during the investigation, the scope of the probe will be extended to include the entire Fifth District from Atlantic Highlands to Cape May,” Rasmussen said in a statement to the press the day the plot was made public. “Not a stone will be left unturned in our endeavor to rid the service of dishonesty. There will be a general housecleaning.”

A total of 10 people had been rounded up so far, he said.

“Additional evidence is coming in our possession through which we hope to implicate others who have taken part in illicit activities. Rumors have come to my attention for some time that men were conniving with the rumrunners. I have done my best to track them down, but could find nothing tangible. Now that it is proved conclusively that there has been collusion, the boys will have to take the consequences,” Rasmussen announced.

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Take a stroll through Lakewood in the 1950s before the release of columnist Steve Frank's piece on growing up in Lakewood in that decade. Coming to APP.com Tuesday.
Clifton Ave, Lakewood, N.J. looking north from 1st Street. Circa 1950's.Courtesy of Lakewood Historical Society Vincent DiSalvio/Correspondent